The disastrous HQ of Britain's secret service

The government is persisting in its efforts to pass the so-called Justice and Security Bill. Through the introduction of secret judicial processes, it would permit the cover-up of illegal activity by the State. The attempt should be abandoned.

When I worked on the City pages of The Daily Telegraph a quarter of a century
ago, we young reporters were advised by Christopher Fildes, the paper’s
legendary financial columnist, to take note of three corporate sell signals.

The first concerned the chief executive. If he purchased a string of
racehorses, it meant that he wasn’t concentrating on the job and had got
ideas above his station. The second was the appearance of a fountain in the
head office foyer, a sure indication of extravagance and frivolity. Finally,
Mr Fildes urged us to view with distrust all companies that shifted to a
lavish new headquarters. Too often for comfort, he asserted, such a move
presaged disaster.

When I moved to cover politics, I soon realised that the same rule applied in
the public sector. The textbook case concerns the Home Office, which
notoriously descended into a dysfunctional shambles after it moved from its
headquarters in Queen Anne’s Gate to gleaming new offices in Marsham Street
eight years ago. Likewise, the government Whips Office lost all purpose
after being shifted from its historic 12 Downing Street base.

Something went wrong with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) shortly after
it moved into its hideous new HQ, whose rear end overlooks the Thames with
the same elegance and charm as the stern of an expensive cruise liner. I am
not talking about the operational errors, of which one of the most recent
has been the failure to grasp, despite warning signals, the role played by
al-Qaeda in the Syrian uprising until too late. Far more troubling have been
the structural problems that emerged after the existence of SIS was formally
acknowledged in 1994 – by curious coincidence the same year as the building
in Vauxhall was opened.

The first of these has been the propinquity between the intelligence and
political establishments, a normal state of affairs in authoritarian states
but always very troubling in democracies. This became manifest after 1997
under New Labour, when for a time SIS and the Blairite machine in effect
merged. New Labour spin doctors travelled to Vauxhall to brief intelligence
chiefs on how to conduct their public relations. Meanwhile, SIS shockingly
tolerated New Labour’s use of secret intelligence as political propaganda.

This process reached its apotheosis in the notorious Iraq dossier of September
2002. Ten years have passed since the start of that catastrophic conflict
and still questions remain to be answered. The Chilcot Inquiry, which was
supposed to answer them (then again, perhaps it wasn’t) appears to have sunk
without trace.

The second problem involves British complicity in torture. Like the
repudiation of traditional intelligence methods that led to the Iraq fiasco,
this had its origins in the merger between the security elite and the
political class after 1997.

Bear in mind that Margaret Thatcher, when prime minister, had refused to
countenance the use of evidence gathered under torture. This doctrine was
turned on its head by Tony Blair’s government. After 9/11, though under
pressure from the United States, British intelligence officers (from both
SIS and the domestic intelligence agency MI5) were still barred from
carrying it out themselves. But a new convention permitted them to seek
evidence gathered under torture.

In particular, Britain became heavily complicit in what is known as
extraordinary rendition, or the kidnap and subsequent torture of individuals
as a matter of state policy. It goes without saying that this activity is
against the law, and wholly contrary to our international obligations as a
signatory of the United Nations Convention against torture.

Reports of British involvement leaked out at an early stage, but for a very
long time were denied by ministers. Foreign secretary Jack Straw exploded in
indignation when Britain was accused in 2005 of being party to the CIA
extraordinary rendition programme: “Unless we all start to believe in
conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that
behind this is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark
forces in the United States, and also, let me say, we believe that Secretary
Rice is lying, there is simply no truth that the United Kingdom has been
involved in rendition, full stop.”

Mr Straw has since gone quiet in the face of a mass of overwhelming evidence.
This silence brings me on to the Justice and Security Bill, whose committee
stage will today be debated in the Commons. A superbly researched Centre for
Policy Studies pamphlet Neither Just nor Secure, by Anthony Peto QC
of Blackstone Chambers and the Conservative backbencher Andrew Tyrie, argues
that the Bill may stop the truth ever emerging about British involvement in
torture. It enables government secretly to present evidence in civil cases,
without allowing the other party or his or her lawyers to see it. The other
party can never even know, let alone challenge, the evidence presented
against him. A judge will decide whether the evidence should be heard in
open court.

Second, the Bill blocks the courts from using the information-gathering legal
principle known as Norwich Pharmacal. “This would make it harder,” argue the
authors, “to uncover official wrongdoing in matters such as extraordinary
rendition.”

Third, the authors demonstrate that the mechanisms set up by John Major in the
Intelligence Services Act of 1994 to make the security services accountable
have failed. Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee is beyond
incompetent. It is supposed to oversee the security services. In 2007, the
hapless ISC found no evidence of complicity in any extraordinary rendition
operations in a notorious report from which, it has now emerged, 42 vital
documents had been withheld. The Gibson Inquiry into rendition, set up by
David Cameron in 2010, was just as useless and has now been abandoned.

Successive ISC chairmen (the former foreign office minister Kim Howells has
been the worst) have been bossed around by government, and shown a
feeble-minded naivety. “In recent years,” the authors note, “a string of
appointees have come out of Government to chair the Committee only to return
to the front bench afterwards.” Nothing in the Justice and Security Bill
remedies this toothlessness.

John le Carré once wrote that “the only real measure of a nation’s political
health” is the state of its intelligence services. For much of the last
century (as readers of Mr le Carré’s novels can surmise) they have
manifested a distinctive British integrity, ruthlessness, tolerance,
eccentricity, and breathtaking heroism when required.

But, if Mr le Carré is right, something must have gone wrong with 21st-century
Britain. Few sensible people would deny that we need effective security
services, nor that the great majority of people who work for them are highly
capable and patriotic, condemned by the nature of their work to stay quiet
about their achievements and the bravery of what they do.

But the best intelligence officers admit that British complicity in torture
has amounted to a thoroughgoing betrayal of our values, acted as a
recruiting sergeant for terrorism, and made intelligence gathering more
difficult. Deepening the secret state is a step in the wrong direction. The
objective of any decent government should be to expose as much of the truth
as we can about British involvement in torture, not to hush it up. It’s time
for the Coalition to ditch its shameful little Bill.

Peter Oborne is the former chief political commentator of the Telegraph and reports for Channel 4's Dispatches and Unreported World. He has written a number of books identifying the power structures that lurk behind political discourse, including The Triumph of the Political Class. He is a regular on BBC programmes Any Questions and Question Time and often presents Week in Westminster. He was voted Columnist of the Year at the Press Awards in 2013.

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